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It was hardly love at first sight. When Julian Lloyd Webber, the cellist and younger brother of composer Andrew, first met fellow cellist Jiaxin Cheng, he was not thinking about marriage.

A relationship “just wouldn’t have occurred to me”, he says, from his armchair opposite Cheng in the sitting room of the South Kensington mansion flat they now share.

Today, however, evidence of their relationship exists all around their home. In the bedroom, where a music stand rests in position at the end of the bed, a photograph on the mantelpiece shows the neat and compact 37-year-old Cheng leaning in to kiss the 60-year-old Lloyd Webber — a stooping giant by comparison. As always, he talks in a considered and soft voice while peering out from under his trademark wispy grey fringe.

These days all interviews happen this way — the couple together, with Cheng listening and occasionally intervening. Like any pair of good musicians, one supposes, their conversation works in harmony. Cheng routinely thanking Lloyd Webber for his compliments and Lloyd Webber in turn offering chivalrous opportunities for Cheng to “tell the story” of how they met.

In fact, Lloyd Webber, clearly pleased with his lot, sought out this interview to talk specifically about how Cheng has, as he puts it, “turned my life around”.

The pair have been married for almost three years and have a daughter, nine-month-old Jasmine Orienta (“the Orienta bit is after Leyton Orient — and because she’s part oriental,” says Lloyd Webber). Next Tuesday, in perhaps the ultimate display of solidarity for two musicians, they perform their debut London concert together, playing Vivaldi’s Concerto for Two Cellos in G Minor at Cadogan Hall.

But their relationship got off to a tentative start. Lloyd Webber first met Shanghai-born Cheng on a concert tour of New Zealand, where she was studying, in 2000. They kept in touch and reunited during Lloyd Webber’s subsequent tours in 2004 and 2006.

It was not until 2006 that “something clicked”, says Lloyd Webber, with a snap of his fingers. “I asked her if she would be prepared to come here, to investigate whether it could work. We didn’t really know each other.”

Cheng began travelling back and forth but eventually gave up her quartet and her work as a soloist in New Zealand and told her parents, who had just moved there to be near her, that she was going to London.

“If you never give it a try, you will never know,” she says.

It took time, because back in 2000, weddings were not on the agenda. At least, not weddings involving Cheng. In 2001, Lloyd Webber did get married, to his third wife, Kheira Bourahla. Cheng is wife number four.

“[Falling in love] doesn’t happen to me that easily, but when it does I have to follow it through. That means taking it to the limit, which means getting married. If someone had said to me that I was going to have four wives I never would have believed them,” he says.

But if there is anything the Lloyd Webber brothers are famous for, other than their music, it is their marriages. Andrew has had three wives. “He’s certainly a similar sort of romantic,” says Julian of his brother, who last year called himself a “ladies’ man” — a term Julian also applies to himself.

“I like the company of women, I can’t deny that. Why not? I think at 16 I was a ladies’ man,” he says.

His first wedding was at age 18 to journalist Celia Ballantyne. “I was very young, but we had a good marriage,” he says. Indeed, it lasted 15 years.

Five years after they split, he married exiled Afghan princess Zohra Ghazi, with whom he had a son, David, in 1992. “I don’t think she’d mind me saying it was tempestuous, but it was also good. I don’t regret it at all, I don’t think she does and we have a lovely son.”

Then, in 2001, he married Bourahla, a French-Algerian woman 17 years his junior. It was a matrimony which, when asked why it began to go downhill, he replies: “It was never uphill.”

One night in 2006 the couple was arrested after a scrap at Lloyd Webber’s home. He prefers not to talk about it, but before the subject is changed he cuts in. “I just want to say one thing about that. I was the one who called the police.”

Somewhat incredibly Cheng was undeterred by Lloyd Webber’s baggage. “As a woman, usually three marriages before you would be a worry, but I never thought about it,” she explains. “I never thought it meant he was a bad person, I thought the previous marriages just didn’t work.” She has met all of his ex-wives and says, “I wouldn’t talk about the last one, but his first and David’s mother are nice people.”

“Given my track record in the past I certainly wasn’t leaping into anything else quickly. It had to be practical,” says Lloyd Webber.

“I’ve always been a hopeless romantic. Basically I married the women I loved, so having got to the advanced point of 2006, I really had learnt a lesson not to do it again.”

His divorce from Bourahla — he filed the petition in 2006, the same year Cheng moved to the UK — did not come through until 2008. He and Cheng married in the summer of 2009.

“The difference, the relief to me is fantastic,” says Lloyd Webber — a difference that he puts down to their shared love of the cello.

“I always avoided other musicians…Because I live and breathe music all the time I wanted my partner not to be involved in it. But Jiaxin knows what it’s like to have to play concerts and is very understanding. As a musician, if I am kept on some sort of a rein or someone is nagging at me, I just can’t do it.”

Despite music also being a source of rows (“We don’t argue, really, except when we’re working together,” says Lloyd Webber) the only similarity between this relationship and the last is the age gap of 24 years.

Jiaxin is closer in age to Julian’s 20- year-old son David, than to Julian himself, and so minute that looking at her, it is hard to believe a baby could ever have fitted inside her tiny frame. But despite Lloyd Webber’s age, a baby was always part of the arrangement.

“We talked it all through,” he says. “I said quite clearly, ‘I don’t want a lot but I want one at least,’” adds Cheng

When Andrew Lloyd Webber hit 60 in 2009 he was suffering with prostate cancer, so as an older father potential health problems cannot be far from Julian’s mind.

“There’s a history of cancer in the family. I immediately got a prostate cancer test. It was clear, but of course it’s worrying. There are two ways of looking at it. Maybe later on I’ll have more time to spend with her [Jasmine], whereas I absolutely didn’t with my son,” he says. “I just hope I live long enough to see her growing up.”

At the moment, however, Jasmine is in Shanghai for two weeks with Cheng’s parents and Julian admits that “the majority of looking after has come from Jiaxin.”

“I asked you, ‘Do you want me to cut back on my work?’ and you said, ‘No.’ You’ve been very generous about that,” he says to his wife.

But other than being a “much older dad” the 24-year age gap does not faze either of them. “Sometimes I feel older than you,” says Cheng to her husband. “It is to do with liveliness of mind,” replies Lloyd Webber.

As explanation Lloyd Webber tells a story about the Spanish cellist Pablo Casals, who at age 81 married a 20-year-old. “His doctor said, ‘Aren’t you concerned about the health issues?’ and he replied, ‘I look at it this way: if she dies, she dies.”

One assumes that he means to imply his own age is not an issue.

“That was Casals. It’s nothing to do with me,” he insists. “I think I’m very unlikely to go off with a 20-year-old. I don’t think that’s in the script.”

Julian Lloyd Webber and Jiaxin Cheng will be making their live London debut as a duet with Orchestra of the Swan in a performance of Vivaldi's Concerto for Two Cellos in G Minor at Cadogan Hall, 5 Sloane Terrace, SW1X on Tuesday, March 27 at 7.30pm. Tickets £10-£35, 020 7730 4500.